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Despite my general lack of interest in the latest technology I do try to keep my software up to date, especially when it doesn’t cost me any money. It made sense to upgrade my web browser to Firefox 4, it was supposed to be quicker and more secure after all.

The upgrade was straight-forward, it took a while to get used to the slightly different appearance and I can’t say that I noticed any increase in speed and take their word for it that it is more secure.

Disaster (OK, perhaps that I a bit too strong a word for it) came a couple of days ago when I tried to use the Enhanced Image Viewer on Ancestry.co.uk. Everything looked fine to start with (the scroll bars still didn’t work but I am used to that) but the problems started when I tried to save an image.

The first image saved fine, but when I tried another the browser started playing up. When the dialog box opened up and I tried to type in a filename the browser would freeze for a minute or so and I couldn’t type anything or it would let me type a few characters before locking up. Eventually the page disappeared and I was left to try again.

The only workaround appeared to be to close the browser down after saving an image and then opening it up again and moving on to the next image, not really a practical solution for a family historian short on time. I probably could have viewed the images without the Enhanced Image Viewer, but I do quite like the functionality it provides, so I have downgraded to Firefox 3.6 for now.

I was trying to keep up to date, but in this case technology has let me down. I don’t know who is to blame, presumably Mozilla have updated something and Ancestry need to update their viewer to take that into account.

Still, it is rather frustrating and I wasted too much of my time trying to get it to work and then having to roll-back to Firefox 3.6, so please get it fixed Ancestry or tell me how I can make it work properly.

2 Responses to “If it ain’t broke…”

I’ve encountered the same problem at times with Ancestry – they try to blame it on Internet Explorer, but funnily enough it only ever happens when Ancestry have just done an update; looking at the user message boards, it seems that plenty of other people have encountered this same issue, using both IE and Firefox.